Lexical Effects on Spoken Word Recognition in Children with Hearing Impairment: Test-Retest Reliability of the Persian Lexical Neighborhood Tests

Background: The current study investigated lexical effects on the recognition of spoken words in Persian-speaking children with hearing impairment using Persian lexical neighborhood tests (PLNTs). Methods: The research was administered as a cross-sectional study. PLNTs were performed on thirty-three pediatric hearing aid (HAs) or cochlear implant (CIs) users by sound field under spectrally degraded conditions. Thirteen 7-to- 13-year-old (8 boys and 5 girls) participants completed the experiments, which were administered in a 3 × 4-m acoustic room using a sound field. The order of the tests in each session was from the lowest to the highest signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), ranging from − 2 to 4 dB. The experiments were repeated by the same examiners under the same conditions two months later with nine of the thirteen participants. Results: Pediatric users of HAs or CIs could not optimally recognize spoken words in noise, specifically when they had to recognize words through an auditory-only modality. There was a significant difference in the participants’ SWR performance on the PMLNT-easy versus the PMLNT-hard and the PDLNTeasy versus the PDLNT-hard based on independent samples T test (P<0.001). There was a significant difference in the participants’ SWR performance on the PMLNT-easy versus the PDLNT-easy and the PMLNT-hard versus the PDLNThard based on the independent samples T test as well (P<0.001). Accordingly, word lexical difficulty (easy/hard words) and word length (monosyllabic/ disyllabic words) were the most fundamental factors having significant effects on the recognition of spoken words in children with HAs or CIs in the test/ retest phases. Conclusion: The PLNTs, as a valid assessment toolkit, can be reliably used to measure SWR performance under spectrally degraded conditions in Persianspeaking children with hearing impairment using HAs or CIs.